What is academic integrity?

Academic integrity is a cultural value on which all American academic communities are based. As an applicant for the Global UGRAD program, you will be held to the U.S. standard of academic integrity throughout the application process and the program. The information below focuses specifically on academic integrity as it pertains to your Global UGRAD application—the written essays and the references.

Integrity is synonymous with honesty. Academic integrity is closely related the American cultural value of ownership and promotes the “ownership of ideas” (i). Cheating, improper collaboration, plagiarism and fabrication violate the spirit of academic integrity. Please familiarize yourself with the characteristics of each, as well as with the ways to avoid them.

Cheating and Improper Collaboration

Cheating is “using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information, notes, study aids or other devices or materials in any academic exercise.” (ii) For your Global UGRAD application, this includes acquiring answers or ideas from any unauthorized source, such as purchasing an essay from someone else or asking someone else to write your essay.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For the purposes of your Global UGRAD application, your work should be entirely your own, and not the result of collaboration.

How to avoid cheating and collaboration: Write your essays yourself. Do not ask or pay anyone else to write them for you. Asking someone to proofread your essay for grammatical errors is okay; having them rewrite it for you is not.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work and offering it as your own “without giving credit to that source, whether that material is paraphrased or copied in verbatim or near-verbatim form” (iii) “Plagiarism is the academic and literary equivalent of robbery, taking somebody else's property” or the equivalent of “intellectual thievery.” (iv) This applies to published and unpublished resources: books, magazines, newspapers, etc., material from the web, ideas of or papers written by others. Plagiarism also includes not properly citing a resource used when quoting or paraphrasing.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your Global UGRAD application essays must be cited correctly. If you use words or ideas from a book, paper, or website in your essay, you must include the source (the name and author of the book/paper, or the URL for the website).

How to avoid plagiarism: If you use any resources (books, periodicals, websites, speeches—anything that you have not personally written or said) then you should cite it. You may consult the following website for specific instructions on citing the work of other writers using MLA, APA, or Chicago style, which, depending on the field of study are the standard styles of citation used at most U.S. universities: http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/. Even if you are not familiar with the U.S. systems of citation, give credit in your writing. For example: “As Smith and Finkle said in their 1997 work on economic disparity, ‘Economic disparity stems from many sources.’” When you are giving credit to the
original source, then you are not plagiarizing.

See the following websites for examples of software that IREX, universities and professors use to detect plagiarism:
• https://plagiarismcheck.org/

Fabrication

Fabrication and falsification are the acts of inventing or changing data for research that has not been shown, read or proven. This also includes changing or altering documents and records.

How to avoid fabrication: Do not falsify any of the data or information in your essays. Do not falsify or alter any of your references.

What happens if the standards of academic integrity are not followed?

IREX and Global UGRAD host universities will investigate any and all suspected instances of cheating, improper collaboration, plagiarism, and fabrication. Such instances may be identified through the use of plagiarism detection software, and whenever there is anything suspicious about a submitted document.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are found to have violated the standards of academic integrity, your application will be disqualified. If an applicant is found to have violated the standards of academic integrity, they will be informed of this violation and their application will be invalid; they will be disqualified from the 2011-2012 Global UGRAD fellowship competition. Any such applicant is, however, permitted to reapply in the future for the fellowship.

Uchi.kz recommend all candidates to international scholarship programs to read this article carefully. You have to respect Academical Integrity rules while studying in USA or Europe, passing the tests such TOEFL or IELTS etc.